The Roclcy Mountain Locust. 



for the corn they devoured, the fruits of trees they ate and con- 

 sumed, and hung so thick upon the branches that with their weight 

 they tore them from the body. The highways were so covered with 

 them that they startled the traveling mules with their fluttering 

 about their heads and feet. My eyes were, often struck with their 

 wings as I rode along ; and much ado I had to see my way, what 

 with a montero wherewith I was fain to cover my face, what with 

 the flight of them which were still before my eyes. Where they 

 lighiedin the mountains and highways, there they left behind them 

 their young ones, which were found creeping upon the ground, 

 ready to threaten such a second year's plague, if not prevented ; 

 wherefore all the towns were called, with spades, mattocks and 

 shovels, to dig long trenches and thereinto bury the young ones." 



The early Jesuit missionaries of California have left nu- 

 merous records of their injuries on the Pacific coast. 

 Father Michael del Barco records their visitations in Cal- 

 ifornia in 1722, 1746, and the three succeeding years ; 

 also in 1753, 1754 and 1765. Clavigero, in his History of 

 California, also gives a very full description of these pests. 



In 1827, 1828 and 1834, they destroyed all the crops in 

 the rancheros and missions, and in 1838 and 1846, again 

 did great damage in Upper California. " For more than 

 half a century they have troubled the Argentine Republic 

 in South America. In a latitude corresponding with Lou- 

 isiana and Texas, but in the southern hemisphere, they have 

 made agriculture worthless, and rendered the settlement 

 of that magnificent country between the Andes and the 

 Atlantic Ocean, by a dense population, impossible." * Dr. 

 B. A. Gould gives a graphic account of a swarm of locusts 

 in 1873 that devastated Cordoba, a swarm at least twenty 

 miles in length and six miles in breadth, extending for an 

 altitude of 5° like a thick, black trail of smoke.f Of the 

 ravages of locusts in the Atlantic States, I shall speak 

 more particularly in a future chapter. We have records 

 of great injury from locusts in New Hampshire, Massa- 



' * Rev. Edw. Fontaine, in New Orleans Times, March, 1866. 

 t Amer. Joum. of Sc., Dec , 1873. 



